i like the idea of using /quit instead of /shutdown and getting sure the shutdown is a real one with shutdown -s -t 0 -f ;)
I never used the chkdsk portion but it would not do any harm :D but wasting time :p… well i do a defrag instead.

If there is still a hdd i think it would make sense to defrag before you write cereal to it ;)

I am in belief that you should always sysprep your golden/master image. There are others that say its not necessary. It is required if you want to make a universal image that will work on any hardware. If you sysprep and want to make a universal image all you need to do is ensure the proper drivers are available in the golden image (or install them using a fog post install script) and a single image will deploy to your hardware.

For your second post your sysprep line is missing a few options (at this moment I can’t tell you what is missing, but there IS a command line switch to tell the computer to power off. Also you will probably want to use the unattent.xml file to configure a few options during windows OOBE setup.

If you don’t use the option to power off windows in the sysprep command your shutdown command is spot on.